by Tabor Evans
Merle stopped suddenly, then whistled to stop John who hadn’t heard or seen Longarm’s signals. Frozen on separate, wagon-sized boulders, Comanche John and Merle frowned at Longarm, holding their rifles up high across their chests.
The sound came again from the privy. A fart? Or was Longarm’s battered head playing tricks on him?
Longarm signaled the other two to stay where they were. He leaped onto the next boulder four feet beyond, landing on the ball of his left foot. He continued forward, holding his rifle in his right hand, approaching the privy’s sun- and wind-blistered rear wall. He leaped off the last boulder, stopped ten feet from the privy’s left rear corner, and cocked his head to listen.
Hearing only the hinges squawking and the wind creaking the privy’s pine frame, he continued forward, moving slowly, stepping lightly, aiming the Winchester straight out from his right hip. He could smell the sewage in the breeze blowing through the gaps between the slender pine poles. He walked along the privy’s left side, stepping into the triangle of shade darkening the stones and red gravel.
A heavy-caliber rifle blasted.
Longarm winced and ducked as the ball carved the air three inches in front of his nose while wood slivers basted the right side of his face and his right shoulder. As the ball barked off a rock to his left, Longarm turned toward the privy, swinging his rifle at the smoking, silver dollar-sized hole blasted through the wall.
Before he could level his rifle, a huge body bolted through the wall. Split pine poles flew in every direction. In a bulky buffalo coat, wool shirt, and leather hat, and shielding his face with one raised arm and his Sharps rifle, Magnus Magnusson slammed into Longarm like a ton of gold ore.
Longarm triggered his rifle into what was left of the privy wall a half second before he hit the ground, Magnusson landing on top of him. The burly mountain man was raging like a lunatic in a blazing asylum, pounding Longarm’s face with his forehead. Longarm tried to raise his rifle, but then remembered he’d already fired a shot, and he was in no position to work the cocking mechanism.
When Magnusson rose, grabbed a rock, then raised it with both hands above his head, intending to smash it down on Longarm, the lawman grabbed his pistol from his cross-draw holster, his hand moving automatically.
“Trespassin’ on my fuckin’ territory!” Magnusson roared, spittle flying from his mouth.
As he began slamming the rock toward Longarm’s head, Longarm shoved his Colt’s barrel into the man’s bulging belly and fired. The man screamed like a poleaxed mule. Longarm twisted right as the rock slammed down where his head had been, the big mountain man sprawling on top of it, bellowing into the sand. Smoke and the fetid odor of burning flesh and wool wafted as the ground smothered the fire the shot had started on the man’s shirt.
Rifles boomed behind Longarm.
Rolling out from under Magnusson, he turned to his left.
The wolf was bolting toward him from the cabin, snarling, its hackles raised, eyeing Longarm like supper. Merle and Comanche John were firing at the beast, but several boulders impeded their shots, the slugs tearing into the sand and rocks around the wolf’s flying paws.
The wolf closed fast. It was within twenty yards when Longarm jacked a fresh shell into his rifle’s breech, rose to one knee, and planted a bead on the thick, steel-blue fur of the animal’s chest.
Two more slugs, fired from the direction of Comanche John and Merle, kicked up dust and gravel around the wolf’s feet. Ignoring the shots, the snarling creature leaped toward Longarm, who squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
The wolf yipped shrilly as the slug slammed its left shoulder. Longarm threw himself right, rose to an elbow, and jacked another round. The wolf, growling and showing its teeth, had pushed off the ground and was wheeling again toward Longarm.
Longarm shot it two more times quickly, once through the middle of its chest, once through its head. The wolf flew back, twisting in the air, and fell in a heap.
Magnusson was still bellowing.
Longarm turned to the mountain man, who knelt holding one hand across his bloody belly while sliding a huge Bowie from his belt sheath. He’d barely gotten the knife raised to throw before Longarm drilled him once between the eyes, the slug jetting through his head to paint the sand behind him bright red.
He sagged straight back, eyes rolling back in his head, and lay still.
Longarm turned toward Merle walking toward him, angling her smoking rifle across her chest while Comanche John stood atop a boulder, staring cautiously out over the canyon south of the cabin.
“They dead?” Merle asked as she approached, raking her gaze between Magnusson and the bloody wolf.
“No thanks to you,” Longarm groused, pushing off his right knee. “I thought you could shoot.”
Merle opened her mouth to respond. Comanche John cut her off. “’Nuff snarlin’, pups!” John was staring off down canyon. “The wolf women is headin’ this way!”
Chapter 20
Thumbing fresh shells into his rifle’s loading gate, Longarm ran past the cabin. He stopped at the top of a low rise thirty yards before the shack and stared down canyon.
The wolf women were running toward him—fifty yards away and closing. A pack mule stood behind them, reins hanging, canvas packs bulging with what appeared to be raw ore.
The girls started up the gradual grade toward Longarm, hair bouncing wildly. The black-haired one held a rifle. A silver-plated pistol flashed in her sister’s right hand.
The blonde looked up. Spying Longarm and Comanche John crouched atop a boulder to Longarm’s left, she grabbed the black-haired girl’s arm. They both stopped abruptly, moccasined feet sliding in the talus, hair falling over their shoulders and framing their dusty faces, their eyes glowing savagely.
They stared at him, shifting their eyes to John and Merle moving up from the cabin. Suddenly, the black-haired girl screamed like a she-lion, snapped her Spencer to her shoulder, and fired. The report boomed, echoing around the canyon, the slug whistling over Longarm’s shoulder and blowing up rock behind him.
The girls wheeled, hair flying, and started running back the way they’d come. The mule brayed and fled past the mine portal.
“Hold it!” Longarm dropped to one knee and fired three shots at the fleeing girls’ pounding feet.
Merle ran up beside him and raised her own Winchester. She snapped off two quick shots, then turned to rake a glowering stare between Comanche John and Longarm. “What—you two can’t shoot women?”
Merle fired two more shots, the bullets spanging off boulders as the girls sprinted around a bend in the canyon, beyond the mine portal. “Well, I can!” Merle bolted forward, running down the grade after the wolf women.
Longarm glanced at Comanche John, who knelt atop the boulder, his Spencer’s barrel resting on his left thigh. John hiked a shoulder and winced guiltily. “My trigger finger wouldn’t move.”
Longarm cursed, ejected a spent shell, and ran after Merle, leaping rocks and mine tailings strewn from one side of the canyon to the other.
Rifle fire sounded ahead. Thirty yards down canyon and left, Merle was hunkered down behind a boulder. The wolf girls crouched behind an old, wheelless ore wagon ahead of Merle on the other side of the canyon, at the base of a rocky chute in the towering canyon wall.
Longarm ran toward a low, gravel mound in the canyon floor, where potentilla scrub protruded from upthrust rocks. Over the top of the wagon’s weathered side panel, the dark-haired girl triggered another shot at Merle. Glimpsing Longarm from the corner of her eye, she swung the rifle toward him.
Smoke puffed around the barrel. Longarm winced as the slug nipped denim and skin from the side of his right knee. He dove forward, hit the ground, and crabbed up to the gravelly knoll, casting a glance through the potentilla scrub at the wagon.
Merle fired from around the boulder, the bullet chewing a divot from the side panel, the concussion making a hollow, wooden bark.
Both the black-haired girl and
the blonde ducked out of sight.
Longarm heard Merle curse and fire again, the bullet sparking off the wagon’s rusty rear axle.
The black-haired girl fired two more shots toward the Diamondback marshal, both slugs ricocheting off both sides of the long, V-shaped crack in the boulder.
As the black-haired girl swung her rifle toward Longarm, he triggered the Winchester. She grunted and jerked back, then ducked behind the wagon.
The blonde lifted her head above the side panel. Screaming like a witch loosed from hell, she extended the silver-plated pistol toward Longarm and fired, blinking with each shot, gritting her teeth.
The revolver slugs blew up dust a good two feet in front of Longarm’s cover.
He and Merle cut loose with their Winchesters at the same time. After three shots, Longarm’s rifle clicked empty. He ducked behind the knoll to pluck shells from his cartridge belt and feed them to the Winchester.
Merle fired several more shots; then, her own rifle apparently empty, she ducked back behind the boulder to reload. The black-haired girl swung her rifle toward Longarm, edged the barrel slightly to Longarm’s left, and fired.
Behind Longarm, someone yelled, “Fuck!”
Longarm turned to see Comanche John clutching his right arm as he hobbled toward the lawman. Wincing and grunting, he dropped to his belly and doffed his hat angrily.
“Fuckin’ bitches shot me again!”
“Ain’t they a caution?”
“Shit, I could shoot ’em now!”
“Keep your head down!”
Longarm was with John. He had had enough. His rifle filled with nine fresh shells, he rammed one into the breech and rose from his heels. He walked toward the wagon levering the Winchester from his right hip, pelting the far side panel with .44 slugs, aiming low enough to blow the brains out of the two cowering wolf women’s lovely heads.
They stayed down, out of sight.
Longarm fired his last two shots as he bolted around the end of the wagon, and stopped as he shifted his empty Winchester to his left hand and palmed his Colt with his right.
The girls were gone.
There were only scuff marks in the ground where they’d crouched, shell casings glittering among the rocks and gravel.
A pistol popped, the slug tearing into the rocks off Longarm’s right boot. He swung that way and lifted his gaze up a narrow, boulder-strewn trough in the nearly vertical ridge.
The wolf women were climbing the trough, the black-haired girl first, the blonde second. The blonde turned away from Longarm, her smoking Colt in her right hand.
Climbing, using their hands and feet, the two women disappeared around a bend in the trough.
Longarm cursed and reloaded his Winchester as Merle ran up behind him.
“They’re climbing the damn mountain,” Longarm said, keeping his eyes on the shadow-filled trough.
“Shit,” Merle said. “You goin’ after—”
Longarm was already bolting up the chute, scrambling over boulders with his rifle in one hand. In less than a minute, his lungs felt like sandpaper. He climbed over one boulder after another, ducking under ledges protruding from both sides of the trough.
His heart raced and his vision swam, his head pounding from the altitude as well as the braining he’d taken the night before.
Fifty yards up the mountain, he tramped around a dog-leg in the widening chute, ducked under a protruding thumb of rock, and looked up. The wolf women were climbing hard, skirts buffeted about their bare legs. There was a blood trail on the rocks. The blonde pulled her sister along by one hand, holding the rifle in the other.
Longarm dropped to a knee. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as the women disappeared around another, larger thumb of granite protruding into the trough.
“Christ!” Merle said, moving up beside him, her chest heaving sharply. “They must be used to this altitude. My lungs feel like raisins!”
Longarm drew a deep breath, wheezing. “I’m givin’ up cigars.”
“Me, too.”
Longarm moved out, grabbing stone outcrops and boulders to pull himself forward and up. The sun reflected off the rocks to sear his face. A cool, dry wind blew straight down the trough, rife with the smell of bear grease.
Longarm stopped suddenly and looked up. The trough was empty, neither girl in sight. His heart beat faster. The smell of bear grease was too strong . . .
The thought hadn’t finished sliding through his brain before a keening wail rose. The black-haired girl bolted out from behind a boulder and flung herself down toward Longarm.
A slender knife flashed in her upraised right fist.
From his belt, Longarm angled his rifle up and fired. He jerked back against the trough’s jagged right wall as the black-haired girl’s shriek rose, breaking on the highest note. She flew past him down trough.
He turned left as she hit the ground ten feet in front of Merle, who’d dropped to one knee, rifle aimed.
The black-haired girl rolled several feet then piled up against a boulder in front of Merle, a neat round hole leaking blood in her forehead, eyes wide and staring sightlessly up at Longarm. At the back of her head, thick, red blood and brain matter stained her hair.
Her face had lost its savageness, her lips’ corners lifting slightly, brown eyes soft and lustrous. She looked almost angelic.
“Custis?” Merle shouted.
He ducked as a bullet slammed into the wall behind him, the rifle report resonating like thunder around the trough. Merle fired twice, firing and levering and firing again.
Longarm turned to see both of Merle’s shots puff dust at the heels of the blonde climbing up trough then turning sharply left to crouch behind a boulder.
Longarm and Merle fired at the same time, both slugs blasting the rock before the blonde.
“Raven!” the blonde screamed, then snaked her rifle around the boulder.
She fired, cocked, and fired again, then withdrew behind the boulder once more as Longarm and Merle pelted it with .44 rounds. The blonde snaked her rifle around the boulder.
Longarm aimed up trough. When the blonde’s head appeared, lips bunched with fury, Longarm snugged his cheek to his rifle stock.
The blonde jerked her head back behind the boulder, and Longarm lifted his own head away from his rifle stock.
The earth shuddered. Suddenly several stones dropped from the wall above him, peppering the trough before his boots. Up trough, a hub-sized rock bounced toward him, followed a second later by several more the same size.
The ground leaped and pitched under Longarm’s boots.
He looked up trough again.
Two boulders the size of small wagons were rolling down the chute, as though made of India rubber. The blonde stood, facing them, her rifle in one hand, frozen in terror.
Longarm turned to where Merle crouched behind a box-like boulder in the middle of the chute, holding her rifle in both hands while lifting her gaze up the wall to her right.
Longarm shouted, “Rockslide!”
He bolted out from the right wall, angling across the trough and down. He swept Merle up with his right arm and half-carried, half-dragged her toward the opposite wall.
Boulders careened over and behind them. Several fell from the wall above to follow the others down the mountain. The cacophony made Longarm’s teeth clack and his eardrums rattle.
Struggling to maintain his footing on the bouncing and heaving bed of the trough, he bolted into an alcove, dropping to his knees and pulling Merle down beside him as rocks flew past like giant hailstones.
As he crouched, tipping his hat against pelting debris, he saw the blonde fly past, hurled like a rag doll among the rocks, tumbling and rolling in a curtain of billowing dust. In seconds, she was gone.
Longarm hunkered down beside Merle, shielding her from the slide and squeezing his eyes closed against the dust. He felt Merle’s arms close around his waist, her head press hard against his chest. She shuddered in his arms, but he couldn’t tell
if she were shaking or being shaken.
The slide continued for several minutes. It stopped gradually, like a late-summer squall, the last few rocks clattering like raindrops on a tin roof.
Silence.
Longarm turned toward the trough. So did Merle, keeping her arms around him. Dust wafted, swept by the breeze down canyon. Except for the dust, the trough looked much as it had before, the debris rearranged.
Longarm looked down at Merle. The first several buttons of her loosely woven blouse were undone, a good bit of cleavage showing behind her lacy chemise.
She looked up at him, then followed his gaze to her breasts. She lowered her arms, pulled away, and, scowling up at him with mock reproof, buttoned her blouse.
Turning back to the trough, she muttered, “Shit . . . close one . . .”
On their way down the dusty corridor, they looked for signs of either wolf woman but found nothing but cracked boulders, strewn talus, and sifting dust. The wolf women had no doubt been pulverized in the slide. They’d be forever part of the canyon.
Longarm took Merle’s hand as they made their way over the last few yards of crushed rock and cracked boulders jumbled at the mouth of the trough, virtually sealing the canyon. Dust still wafted, as though a twister had blown through.
Merle looked around. “Uncle John?”
She and Longarm turned down canyon, picking their way among the freshly strewn rubble, blinking against the dust, calling for John.
They both stopped when someone coughed on the other side of a sifting dust cloud.
Longarm said, “John, you son of a bitch. Are you still kicking?”
Comanche John staggered through the dust cloud, his Spencer’s barrel resting on his right shoulder. With his left hand, he adjusted his eye patch and ran a dirty finger over his lone eye’s dusty lid.
He coughed. “What the hell did you two do up there?”
Longarm glanced at Merle. He moved forward, clapped Comanche John on the shoulder, then headed up toward the cabin.